As a professional roboticist, this is really exciting. It could have an even bigger impact that the Kinect (and other depth sensors). For the last few decades

As a professional roboticist, this is really exciting. It could have an even bigger impact that the Kinect (and other depth sensors). For the last few decades, actuators have been the dominant cost of building such a robot. Comparable arms routinely cost ~$100k (from the PR2, Meka, ABB, Barrett, Kuka, etc). Essentially, Baxter represents a 10x cost savings, taking the per-arm cost from ~$100k to ~$10k each. Actually... Rod is my "academic grandfather." Yesterday I had the opportunity to interview him for Hizook's feature article: http://www.hizook.com/blog/2012/09/18/baxter-robot-rethink-robotics-finally-unveiled http://www.hizook.com/blog/2012/09/18/baxter-robot-rethink-r... So much for yesterday's HN frontpage article about hardware being dead...